About
Description
A direct response to Andrej Karpathy’s viral post on using Claude with Obsidian. Argues that traditional PKM (backlinks, graph views, plugin chains) is being replaced by PKA — Personal Knowledge Assistance — where AI agents build, index, and retrieve from a simple local folder. Walks through Tom’s own setup: a local directory, Claude Code, an inbox-based AI team, and an orchestrator agent called Larry routing tasks to specialised sub-agents.
Notes
- PKM → PKA shift: Traditional PKM puts the human in the loop for all bookkeeping. PKA flips it — AI builds, indexes, and retrieves; human reviews conclusions.
- The folder is the knowledge base, not the app: Plain markdown files on disk. Obsidian (or VS Code, or anything) is just a viewer. Swap the tool without touching the files.
- Platform independence: Tom demos swapping Claude for Gemini with zero changes to his file structure. No lock-in.
- Orchestrator pattern: “Larry” routes tasks to specialised sub-agents. Inbox = where AI deliverables land for human review, not a notes dump.
- Conclusions over inputs: Knowledge base should store synthesised conclusions, not raw captures. AI does the synthesis.
→ See PKM & PKA